AFP “manages” a lucky break. Not so Rudd.

THE Australian Crime Commission and the Australian Federal Police had a lucky day. Kevin Rudd and an Abbott staffer did not. The ACC and AFP, like all bureaucracies, desire to widen their powers and wealth. No bureaucracy ever says, “Our task is smaller now. We need less money and fewer people.”

When a bureaucracy has evidence that it is doing a good job and evidence of a threat that suggests they should have more people and money combat it, it will want to shout that message from the rooftops.

In this instance, it was not from the rooftops, but from the Sydney Mail Exchange. The message was a 154 per cent increase in drug seizures – 23 tonnes worth $5 billion.

Details were in the ACC’s annual illicit–rug data report. But data does not make good television. Packets of white powder in cellophane do. So do moving parcels in which drugs can be easily hidden.

This was all carefully staged and timed for the evening news bulletins.

The ACC and AFP got lucky. Nothing much was happening on Monday, so the story got a good run.

Not so the Abbott staffer who got done for drink driving on Budget night. The information leaked out on Monday. Nothing much was happening on Monday, so it, too, got a good run.

Kevin Rudd was also unfortunate. Like the ACC and AFP he is a media creature and plans accordingly. He did not want to call a media conference to announce his support for gay marriage. Rather it had to come out in a thoughtfully crafted blog to be picked up by the print media first, so it can out on Monday evening, too late to get other comment. So he got untainted and comprehensive coverage.

Broadcast would follow on Tuesday night, with them coming to him rather than the other way around. That way he could not be accused of undermining his leader (who opposes gay marriage), but merely as a thoughtful MP legitimately changing his mind according to his conscience, and not at all being a media tart.

Alas, before the Tuesday evening bulletins went to air, the tornadoes struck in the US and the Rudd-gay-marriage story was relegated to “in other news tonight” after viewers’ attention spans had been depleted.

While these events were unfolding, the findings of some research into the people who deliver the reportage of these events was published.

Folker Hanusch, senior lecturer in journalism at the University of the Sunshine Coast, said that more than half of journalists he surveyed described themselves as left-wing and only 13 per cent as right of centre. Their voting intentions were 43 per cent Labor; 30 per cent Coalition and 19 per cent Greens.

But among the senior editors the voting intention was much more favourable to the Coalition: 44 per cent Coalition, 33 per cent Labor and 11 per cent Green.

The full results will be reported in the June edition of Australian Journalism Review.

The research should not be surprising. And it would be silly to use it as an argument for more conservative voices in the media. It is not going to happen.

Journalism of its nature will attract people who are interested in change, the unusual, ideas, possibilities and novelty. Those people are not going to be innately conservative – people who feel comfortable with stability and sameness.

The results for senior editors is also unsurprising. Usually they will have financial and staffing responsibilities. They also deal with complaints from the public and organisations being reported upon. These things make them more cautious.

You might conclude that the more active those in senior ranks are in the publication process, the more conservative the product will be.

That influence can come in several ways: whether to run a story at all; what prominence to give it; and what angle should be taken on it.

Now let’s return to our three stories and the tornadoes.

Events, like a tornado or resigning Pope, are always going to affect whether lesser stories are run and the prominence given to them. Remember, the collapse of Ansett was an “in other news story” on 11 September 2002. And a whole lot of “news” did not get a run at all.

Because these events are big, dramatic and memorable, media consumers might be excused for imagining that the news by-and-large is driven by events.

Not so. People inside and out can influence it. People outside the media can put their subtle spin on events and journalists report what they say. Organisations can even create events – like the Sydney Mail Exchange gathering on drug seizures.

The result is that even many reporters’ dispassionate and accurate reports can overall be misleading.

The impression that Australia is awash with drugs and crime is simply wrong. Crime has been consistently falling since the 1950s and society has been getting safer. But that is boring and not news. Though given the impression of rising crime has been so pervasive for so long, one day an astute news editor might well think that a falling-crime story is so novel that it is newsworthy – a sort-of man-bites-dog story.

But it should be the duty of those conservative senior editors to correct the overall wrong impression, or to ensure those impressions do not arise in the first place.

But they don’t. They can order the running with prominence story after story (each in itself accurate but in reality isolated) to give an overall misleading impression.

When that fails they can also re-angle a story politically: “Abbott stands by contrite staffer on drink-drive charge.” “Rudd and Gillard at loggerheads on gay marriage”.

After all, it is the conservative senior editors who assign most of the story chasing; determine if and where a story will run; and can re-write the intro and write the headline.

The re-angle is important. Often a news organisation cannot simply ignore a story that others are running. The answer is a re-angle, to soften it or turn it around.

Overall, the research shows that all the hype about a left-wing media bias in Australia should be taken with caution. Whatever the biases of reporters on the street, it is counter-balanced by the biases of the senior media executives.

An here’s a scary thought. It may not be a case of the political views of the senior media executives lining up with community political views, but a case of the community political views being moulded to those of the senior media executives.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 25 May 2013.